Sunday, September 30, 2007

Spain and Cuba have taken a big step towards mending relations by signing a new partnership deal. Ties had been severed since 2003 when La Havana jailed 75 dissidents. The deal includes support for small businesses, the environment, and joint efforts in other countries such as Haiti.

"This is a move aimed at helping the poorest," said Spain's International Cooperation minister Leire Pajin. "We will cooperate where help is needed, regardless of where a citizen is from or his government." Spain is Cuba's third biggest trading partner at around 700,000 euros per year and a major investor in the island.

The European Union is split over Cuba, with Madrid's socialist government favouring more engagement, and other EU members keen to keep up pressure for political change. The Spanish foreign minister set the stage for the agreement with a visit in April - the first by an EU official since the crackdown on dissidents four years ago.Advertising.

Saturday, September 29, 2007

"There are those in this race for the presidency who are touting their experience working the system, but the problem is that the system isn’t working for us,” Mr. Obama said. “There are those who are saying you should be looking for someone who can play the game better, but the problem is that the game has been rigged. The time is too serious the stakes are too high to play the same game over and over again.”

(CNN) -- As Democratic and Republican presidential candidates scour the country for votes during the 2008 campaign, they'll inevitably court the Hispanic community, a voting group growing rapidly in number and diversity.art.univision.debate.gi.jpg

The Hispanic vote is neither homogenous nor loyal to one party. Though the current political moment seems to favor the Democratic Party, experts say that affinity should not be taken for granted.

The Hispanic community is the fastest-growing minority group in the United States, according to the U.S. census.

But its percentage of the electorate is lower than its numbers as a whole because of lower citizenship rates, less voter participation and a youthful demographic. Of the nation's more than 44 million people of Hispanic origin, about a third are too young to vote.

But all that's changing.

Before the midterm elections in 2006, the Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington-based think-tank, estimated more than 17 million Hispanics would be eligible to vote in that election. The number represented a 7 percent increase from 2004.

The Hispanic share of the U.S. electorate increased from 8.2 percent to 8.6 percent during the same period, Pew estimated.

That percentage may grow even more by 2008 as a result of citizenship drives, get-out-the-vote campaigns and the natural growth of the community.

Univision, the Spanish-language broadcast giant, has thrown its considerable weight behind a citizenship drive this year. "We feel that empowering our audience is good for Hispanics and the country," Univision President Ray Rodriguez told the Wall Street Journal in May 2007, adding that it was "a totally nonpartisan effort."

Organizations such as the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, or NALEO, are also mobilizing the vote.

"We have spearheaded a massive naturalization campaign and close to, I think, a million applications will have been submitted this fiscal year," said NALEO's executive director, Arturo Vargas.

The change in the electorate could play a significant role in possible swing states like Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Florida during the 2008 election. There's a reason the Democratic Party decided to hold its presidential convention in Denver, experts said.

"I don't think it's really registered with people just how influential the Latino vote can be in some of these state primaries," Vargas said.

The Hispanic vote has historically been aligned with the Democratic Party, an allegiance established during the administrations of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, said Harry Pachon of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute.

That political alignment was further cemented when Proposition 187 -- designed to deny health care, education and welfare benefits to illegal immigrants -- was pushed by Republicans and passed in California in 1994.

But the Republican Party, intent on gaining more Hispanic voters, made inroads during the early parts of this decade, culminating in the 2004 presidential campaign by President Bush. Exit polls showed he carried 40 to 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

"There are a lot of issues that Latinos agree with Republican philosophy," Pachon said, pointing to the GOP stances on entrepreneurship, fiscal policies, its appeal to Hispanic evangelicals and its policies toward Cuba.

But the heated immigration debate, when many congressional Republicans disagreed with President Bush over granting a path toward citizenship for many illegal immigrants, may erode those gains.

"The Republicans are really caught between a rock and a hard place," Pachon said.

They must balance the interests of a segment of their constituency that is very anti-immigrant with the interests of a "Latino voter that is affluent and middle class, who can theoretically be reached by Republican Party principles," he said.

It is little wonder then, that among Republican presidential candidates, only Arizona Sen. John McCain agreed to appear at an Univision debate scheduled for mid-September. The debate didn't happen. All but one of the Democratic contenders appeared for their debate.

Some Republican leaders said last week not participating in such debates could harm the party's standing with minority groups for the 2008 election and beyond.

"What are we going to do -- meet in a country club in the suburbs one day?" former congressman and GOP vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp told The Washington Post. "If we're going to be competitive with people of color, we've got to ask them for their vote."

"This [political environment] gives Democrats a huge advantage," Adam J. Segal, who heads the Hispanic Voter Project at Johns Hopkins University, said in an e-mail. He also runs the 2050 Group, a multicultural public relations firm based in Washington.

"They are likely to draw far more Hispanic votes than in 2004 and would gain at least a half-million vote advantage" under one of his group's more conservative scenarios, Segal said.

But the Hispanic community is diverse and voting interests are not homogenous, which imperils such predictions.

Hispanic immigrants originate from more than a dozen different countries, arrived in the U.S. through numerous immigration waves and have different perceptions of communal identity, Segal said.

For example, a Cuban-American may vote Republican because of the GOP's long-standing policies toward Cuba, whereas a Puerto Rican voter in New York City or a voter in a border state may be driven by different motives.

The culture of a state can also affect a Hispanic voter's behavior. A voter in Texas may be more conservative, whereas a voter with a similar background in California may be more liberal, Pachon said.

There may also be generational cleavages, Pachon said. A study he conducted with a colleague on the impact of religion on the Latino vote revealed differences between first-, second- and third-generation Hispanics. The first and third generations said religion was more important to them when compared to the second generation.

Additionally, despite the furor over immigration, that issue might not be the most important to Hispanic voters, NALEO's Vargas said. "If the election were held today, I think immigration would be a significant factor, but we're more than a year away from the election," he said.advertisement

Based on a series of town hall meetings conducted in 2004 and conversations throughout this year, Vargas said education, the Iraq war, the economy and health care may take precedence over immigration.

"We need to distinguish issues that matter to the Latino community versus the issues that matter to Latino voters," he said. "Those are not the same."

Cuba’s daily Granma, under the byline of Héctor Arturo, has reported that the son of the Bolivian government official who murdered Che Guevara when he was captured, presented himself before the newspaper “El Deber” and asked to have a note published where he said that he was grateful to the Cuban doctors who had restored the sight of his elderly father who was suffering from cataracts. The operation took place in Bolivia under the program “Operation Miracle” of the Republic of Cuba.

The name of the official was Mario Terán. When he received the order from his bosses, he had to resort to alcohol to obtain courage and to be able to carry it through. He himself narrated to the news media later on how he shook like a leave before this man, who in that moment he saw as “big, very big.”

Che, wounded and unarmed, sat on the floor of the humble school, observed the man as he was vacillating and was fearful, and had all the courage that this assassin was lacking and opened his green olive shirt, bared his chest and screamed “Don’t shake any more and shoot here, because you are going to kill a man.”

Mario Terán was carrying out the orders of Generals René Barrientos and Alfredo Ovando, the White House and the CIA.

Now, Mario Terán did not have to pay a cent for the cataracts operation by Cuban doctors in a hospital donated by Cuba and inaugurated by President Evo Morales in Santa Cruz.

Four decades after Mario Terán tried to kill with his crime a dream and an idea, Che wins another battle. And he continues his struggle…

U.S. Senator Michael D. Enzi,(R-Wy), one of the many reactionary right-wing GOP senators who serve in the United States Senate is trying to demonize the children's health care bill that passed yesterday in the United States Senate by a 67-29 vote. The senator said the following: "We shouldn't be laying the foundation for Castro-style health care."

Senator you are very ill informed. The fact of the matter is that ALL CHILDREN in Cuba have an excellent health care system. That is one of the great achievements of the Cuban Revolution. You and your party are so cheap and so greedy, that you would like to keep nine million American children without the proper health insurance.

George W. Bush has promised to veto the SCHIPS Health care bill. There are enough votes in the U.S. Senate to override his veto, but proponents of the bill are 25 votes short in the House to override the "Devil in Chief".

Respected Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa said: “This bill is not socialized medicine. Screaming ‘socialized medicine’ is like shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. It is intended to cause hysteria that diverts people from reading the bill, looking at the facts.”

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Radio Coco in Havana has reported that 27 baseball players who are part of the national baseball pre-selection have been elected to participate in a seven nations baseball tournament in Valencia, Venezuela. It will start next October 2 and will have the name of First Latin America and Caribbean League.

MIAMI — The father of a 5-year-old Cuban girl at the center of an international custody battle did not abandon her despite failing to contact her for months, a judge ruled Thursday.

The case now moves into a second phase in which Circuit Judge Jeri B. Cohen must rule whether the girl should live with her father, Cuban farmer Rafael Izquierdo, 32, or stay with her foster parents in Miami.

Havana (VNA) – Viet Nam will continue to provide rice to Cuba under governmental and company contracts in 2008 with the same volume and conditions as in 2007, said a Vietnamese government official on September 26. At the 25th session of the Viet Nam-Cuba Joint Committee which opened in Havana on September 26, Construction Minister Nguyen Hong Quan, who is a co-President of the joint committee and co-chairman of the session, further informed that encouraged by the results of the project on household-based rice farming in Cuba, the Vietnamese Government decided to increase its financial assistance to the project’s third phase by ten fold.

Ricardo Cabrisas, Cuban Minister of Government, co-President of the joint committee and co-chairman of the session affirmed that the session would open a new period for expansion of bilateral economic relations.

On behalf of the Cuban people, Minister Ricardo Cabrisas thanked the Vietnamese Government for providing rice to Cuba.

Cubans remember the 1990s as a time of dire crisis and hunger, but researchers have found that the resulting population-wide weight loss helped reduce deaths from conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.

A team from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Loyola University and Cienfuegos, Cuba, studied the crisis triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the Cuban economy shrunk by 40 per cent in four years.

Fuel shortages meant Cubans had to give up cars and use Chinese-made bicycles to get around, while their calorie intake plummeted from an average 2,900 a day in 1988 to 1,863 in 1993.

The result was a decline in obesity, and also in the number of deaths attributed to diabetes, coronary heart disease and stroke, according to the study in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Between 1997-2002, deaths caused by diabetes declined by 51 per cent, coronary heart disease mortality dropped 35 per cent and stroke mortality by 20 per cent.

Cubans are still traumatized by the hunger they lived through in the early 1990s, sometimes joking that stray animals vanished from the streets of Havana because people ate them.

To this day, food is the main topic of conversation for Cubans, even though their calorie consumption is back up to international levels and obesity is making a comeback.

In 1987, 30 per cent of Havana residents were classed as physically active. But by 1995, that figure had risen to 70 per cent due to the widespread use of bicycles and walking.

___

JG: People who will defend their right to be free of foreign domination can never be starved into submission.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

New York, Sept. 26: The Left parties may not yet have stopped the Manmohan Singh government from operationalising the nuclear deal, but their demand is already prompting a leftward lurch in India’s foreign policy.

On the eve of the opening of the 62nd UN General Assembly here yesterday, external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee met Felipe Perez Roque, the foreign minister of Cuba.

It has been at least 15 years since an Indian Prime Minister or a senior minister met any Cuban official in New York for a detailed review of bilateral relations.

The Americans make it clear that Cubans are unwelcome in New York though they are here for UN work. There were contacts between the Indians and the Cubans last year, but they were of a routine nature and dealt only with Cuba’s leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).

However, this time Indian officials said Mukherjee “sought and received a briefing on the health of President Fidel Castro” from Roque.

The external affairs minister’s initiative in seeking a meeting with his Cuban counterpart is meant to signal that India is not abandoning its traditional friends in favour of Washington and is expected to please the Left.

Officials said India is going ahead with a decision, controversial in the US, to let ONGC Videsh, India’s public sector oil exploration firm, to drill for oil in Cuba’s economic exclusion zone in the Gulf of Mexico. A six-year agreement envisages ONGC Videsh exploring an area of 4,300sqkm in Cuban waters.

US companies are banned from economic activity in Cuba and Florida’s large anti-Castro brigade is lobbying in Washington to punish firms that drill in Cuban waters, alleging environmental damage.

But it is not as if Mukherjee has caved in to the Left on foreign policy. While attention in India has been focused in recent weeks on the activities of Anil Kakodkar, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) General Conference in Vienna, Mukherjee has been quietly keeping the nuclear deal alive in New York.

In the last three days, the Indian external affairs minister met the foreign ministers of seven of the 34 countries represented on the IAEA’s board of governors.

The board has to eventually approve an additional protocol and a safeguards agreement with India before the nuclear deal can be operationalized.

Mukherjee had the most unlikely meetings here with the foreign ministers of countries such as Albania and Algeria only because they are on the IAEA board.

He also met the foreign ministers of Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Canada and China. All these countries are on the board of the UN nuclear watchdog.

Tomorrow, Mukherjee, along with the nuclear scientist and principal scientific adviser to the Prime Minister, R. Chidambaram, will meet US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in Washington. They are going there ostensibly for a conference on climate change at the initiative of US President George W. Bush.

Officials said if the Left parties criticised Mukherjee’s meetings here, his defence would be that he was not “negotiating” anything with IAEA board members, but merely “discussing” the situation.

Foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon is, meanwhile, meeting member states of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), which has to change its rules for operationalisation of the nuclear deal.

Menon did not accompany Mukherjee last year for the UN General Assembly and it is presumed that his mandate this year is primarily to work on the 45 NSG countries.

Less preoccupation with the nuclear deal has also enabled Mukherjee to concentrate on India’s neighbourhood. He spent his first day here on Sunday meeting China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, the President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapakse, and attending a meeting co-chaired by the UN secretary-general and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

On Monday, Mukherjee, who is the leader of the Indian delegation to the UN General Assembly, met Rangin Spanta, the foreign minister of Afghanistan, and George Yeo, the foreign minister of Singapore.

Yesterday, he met Nepal’s foreign minister, Sahana Pradhan.

Mukherjee also met the foreign ministers of Russia, China and Brazil, as part of an initiative that groups Brazil, Russia, India and China or BRIC.

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 26 (Reuters) - Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque hit back at U.S. President George W. Bush on Wednesday, saying he was a reckless global cop who has put the world's security at risk.

A day after he stormed out of the U.N. General Assembly hall when Bush referred to ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro as a "cruel dictator" whose rule was coming to an end, Cuba's envoy said the U.S. president had no right to demand "regime change" in sovereign countries through war and sanctions.

"It was an embarrassing show, the delirium tremens of the world's policeman, the intoxication of imperial power, sprinkled with mediocrity and cynicism," he said of Bush's speech on Monday.

Bush scolded Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Myanmar and other states for trampling on their people's rights.

He said the United Nations must insist on free speech and elections in Cuba as the Communist-run country enters a period of transition after Castro handed power to his brother Raul on July 31, 2006.

Perez Roque said Bush had no right to talk about democracy because "he came to office through fraud and deceit" in the controversial 2000 elections.

"We would have been spared his presence yesterday and would have listened to President Al Gore talking about climate change and the risks to our species," the Cuban minister said.

Perez Roque blamed Bush for the death of 600,000 civilian in the Iraq war and said the U.S. president had no moral grounds to speak about human rights in other nations after authorizing the use of torture against prisoners in the Guantanamo naval base and Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail.

"He has been the most selfish and reckless politician we have ever seen," he said of Bush. "He should be held accountable to the world for his crimes."

Perez Roque began his statement speaking in the name of the 116 developing nations of the Non-Aligned Movement, which Cuba currently heads.

He said the greatest threat to world peace today was "the use of pretexts such as the war on terror" or the "much-trumpeted promotion of democracy" to attack countries labeled "rogue states" by a handful of developed countries.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque spoke on Monday, September 24, at a UN high-level event on climate change in New York, United States. We offer here the full text of the Cuban diplomat's speech.

"Senator Barack Obama, who bravely opposed the launch of the war, has put forward an elaborate proposal for withdrawal that involves the United Nations and regional powers to create a unified government in Iraq. His plan, or something like it, is worth trying."The Nation Magazine, October 8, 2007 issue.

War is not the answerFriends Committee on National Legislation bumper sticker.

Chess Grandmaster Viswanathan "Vishy" Anand took a commanding lead at the World Chess Championship being played in Mexico City. In a powerful and exciting game, he totally dominated his opponent, GM Alexander Morozevich of Russia. Vishy has now seven and a half points and he is the only player who has not lost a single game. Israel's GM Boris Gelfand is in second place with six points.

Vishy right now is playing an outstanding 88 points above his current 2792 ELO rating.

I predict that he will win the world's chess title and he will have a very long reign.

Cuba's daily Granma has reported that Cuba's Ministry of External Relations (MINREX) has issued the following declaration:

The delegation of Cuba withdrew from the plenary deliberations of the General Assembly of the United Nations as a signal of profound rejection to the mediocre and arrogant speech of president Bush.

Bush is responsible for the murder of more than 600,000 civilians in Iraq, authorized the torture of prisoners at the Guantanamo Naval Base and the kidnapping of persons, clandestine air flights and secret jails. He is a criminal and does not have neither moral authority nor credibility to judge another country.

Havana (VNA) - Venezuela has granted Cuba a 100 million USD loan to streamline its railroad network in an effort to reconstruct transportation infrastructure.

The deal was signed between Venezuelan Bank for Economic and Social Development (Bandes) and Cuba's Banco Exterior in Caracas on September 24.

The funding will be used to refit railways and signaling, and upgrade communications.

Cuban Minister of Transportation, Jorge Luis Sierra, said that the agreement will allow his country to increase the speed of trains from 40 to 100 kilometres per hour. It will also help increase capacity of transportation and rail fleet of Cuba, he added.

Chinese auto maker Yutong Group Co. Ltd. has delivered 200 mass transit buses to Cuba, the first such China-made vehicles ever exported, a company spokesman said.

In accordance with a Sino-Cuban export agreement, Cuba will import 5,348 buses or coaches from Yutong, based Zhengzhou, capital of central China's Henan Province, from 2007 to 2009.

The buses, with a value of 300 million yuan (37.5 million US dollars), will first be transported to Lianyungang, east China, from where they will be shipped to Cuba.

Yutong is a large enterprise group with bus making as the core business. It is also involved in auto parts and engineering machinery manufacturing, and property development. The group chalked up more than 10.14 billion yuan (1.27 billion US dollars) in total sales last year.

The company started to export coaches to Cuba in 2005 and by late 2006, it exported more than 1,200 coaches to the Caribbean nation. Yutong also exports coaches to other countries and regions in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Today, the United States House of Representative passed by a vote of 265-159, to “expand a health care program for children in low-income families,” the Washington Post has reported. The vote “falls short of the two-thirds majority needed to override a presidential veto.”

“The bill aims to insure more children in low-income families that cannot afford health insurance but earn too much to qualify for the Medicaid program for the poor.”

Whether it is protection for the working class, or providing health insurance for children, the “Decider in Chief” and his party are opposed to it.

It seems to many that all this began with Washington's response to the measures against US properties adopted after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. First, we must make it clear that the White House began its hostilities against the island long before the approval of the first Agrarian Reform law in May of 1959. But there is much more. Before the triumph of the Rebel Army headed by Fidel Castro, the Eisenhower administration did all it could to stop the popular victory on the island. We must point out that the dispute between both sides has its origins over two centuries ago, when in 1767 President Benjamin Franklin expressed interest in the annexation of Cuba through negotiations with Spain. In 1805, Thomas Jefferson was more explicit when expressing: "In the case of war between Britain and Spain, the United States would take control of Cuba for strategic reasons to defend Louisiana and Florida."

Later these desires would take shape in the Ripe Fruit Doctrine, formulated in 1823 by the then US Secretary of State and later president John Quincy Adams who thought that later on the island would fall into the hands of the United States by means of gravity. Almost at the end of the 19th century, 1898, the words were put into practice. As a defensive response to the mysterious and suspicious blowing up of the vessel Maine in the Bay of Havana, the US intervened in the war that the Cuban people were carrying out against the already weakened Spanish army. After the Spanish defeat on December 1st, 1898, the occupying force signed the Treaty of Paris with Spain without any participation of the Cuban people. Madrid then resigned to its rights over the island and the United States occupied it as a so-called temporary measure. The Republic was born on May 20th, 1902, with the Platt Amendment, imposed by the US Congress in to the island's Constitution, by which the US would dispose of, among other prerogatives, the right to intervene in Cuba's internal affairs whenever it deemed necessary. In a letter addressed to Theodore Roosevelt dated October 28th, 1901, Leonard Wood recognized: "There is, of course, little or no independence left Cuba under the Platt Amendment. The only consistent thing to do now is to seek annexation." At that time, American big business controlled the sugar production, the principal and almost only source of national income for the island, owned the best lands, had their hands on the basic public services, as well as mines, banks, foreign trade and all of the island's economy. Cuba's total dependency on the US was such that in 1934, Washington took the luxury of abolishing the Plat Amendment. That control still lasted for 57 years, 1902-1959, without any setbacks.

On January 1st, 1959, the US embassy in Havana, in agreement with high ranking officials of the Batista dictatorship, attempted a coup to smother the triumph of the Revolution and stop the creation of a revolutionary government. During the early days of January 1959, dozens of assassins and thieves fled justice and were welcomed with open arms in Miami. None of them were returned to Cuba, nor was the 424 million dollars stolen from the public treasury by the Batista gang. On January 28th, 1959, barely four weeks after the victory, those fugitives would make public, without any hindrance, the creation of the first subversive organization against Cuba. During the first five months of that same year, the United States adopted the initial measures of its economic war: - In February they denied a modest credit requested by the National Bank to sustain the Cuban national currency affected by the stolen millions of dollars from the public treasury. -For the first time, in March, they reduced the sugar quota due to official pressure from the American Foreign Power; they cancelled a financing of 15 million dollars applied for by the national electric company. -US pressured Britain into stopping the sale of 15 planes and other weapons to the island.

-The Agriculture Department withdrew all officials that inspected the root vegetables, fruits and green vegetables for the US market from Cuba and prohibited the entry of mangos to the country. -The license to sell helicopters destined for Cuban agriculture was revoked.

-Considerably reduced the entry of US vessels to the island. On June 29th, 1960, months before the nationalization, in August and October of that year, the oil firms, Texaco, Esso and Shell were pressured by the White House not to supply oil, and prohibit the use of their refineries to process Soviet oil. Only two weeks later, on July 6th, Washington reduced the quota of Cuban sugar by 700,000 tons. On December 16th, the quota was totally abolished. An explanation of this early hostile conduct against the young Revolution can be found in the memoirs of the then President Eisenhower: "Just weeks after Castro entered Havana, we, the government, began to examine ways that would be effective to crush Castro." A confession that, in a way, reveals the proof.

Source: Cuba News Agency

---

JG: in my opinion the quarrel is driven by typical Yankee imperialist greed. Cuba is a very valuable piece of real estate (stratigically located) and they would like to get their hands into it. Just the same way that the Iraq war was driven by the greed for the oil resources of Iraq.

New York - The Cuban delegation walked out of the UN General Assembly on Tuesday to protest US President George W Bush's call for freedom in Cuba after a transition of power from ailing leader Fidel Castro.

The Cuban delegation, led by the foreign minister, said in a statement that the walkout was a 'sign of profound rejection of the arrogant and mediocre statement by President Bush.'

'Bush is responsible for the murder of over 600,000 civilians in Iraq,' the statement said. 'He authorized the torture of prisoners at the Guantanamo Naval Base and the kidnapping of people, as well as clandestine flights and secret prisons.'

The statement called Bush a 'criminal with no moral authority or credibility to judge any other country.'

In his address, Bush said, 'the long rule (in Cuba) of a cruel dictator is nearing an end. The Cuban people are ready for their freedom.'

'And as a nation enters a period of transition, the UN must insist on free speech, free assembly, and ultimately, free and competitive elections,' Bush said.

Castro has been ill for more than a year and has handed power to his brother, Raul, on an interim basis.

JG: Perez Roque did the right thing. The General Assembly will very soon tell the petulant U.S. president what is their opinion of U.S. Cuba policies, and the current occupant of the White House is not going to like it. To him, it is more important that he continue to fill the coffers of Halliburton and Blackwater in Iraq with our taxpayer's money.

A Canadian businessman has published an interesting, fair, and unbiased article in the Toronto Sun. The article is titled "With capitalism on the rise in socialist Cuba, a Canadian businessman says now is the time for foreign firms to venture in." Making the Cuban system work better does not mean a return to the dog-eat-dog capitalism of the Batista era.

Here is the article:

By JOE WARMINGTON

HAVANA -- His phone rings and he answers in Spanish.

"Hola."

The call is from his hometown of Montreal. He switches to French.

"Bonjour."

When he hangs up the phone, the 53-year-old Canadian looks out over the Malecon and makes this comment. "There are lots of opportunities here. And I am a facilitator."

Now he's speaking in English.

Jean Galipeau is a man of many languages. And many talents.

He is one of the few Canadian business consultants in Havana bringing Canadian investment to socialist Cuba. But it's not just the languages that helps make it work for him. It's his knowledge and experience. "To be successful down here, you need two things," he said. "Patience and money."

You actually need a third.

"Contacts."

Galipeau is a man who has them. For a fixed daily fee, he works in association with the CIH (Centre International of Havana), putting company officials in touch with the people they need to meet in Cuba.

He has as many as seven companies exploring the market at the same time. The inquisitive business people are referred to him by the Montreal firm, Export Assistance Canada -- or referred to him by others.

Galipeau also acts as consultant in what he describes as the "transfer of technology" for the Group Cesigma, a firm specializing in environmental technologies under the ministry of science technology and environment.

"In Cuba it's all about contacts," he said. "You have to have persistence. You cannot do business with the Cubans by Internet or by telephone. You have to be present down here on a regular basis."

This is why Galipeau lives in Cuba. In fact, if you are looking for him, he is normally in a lounge in the Melia Cohiba Hotel with a phone by his side. "I have lived in the hotel for four years," he laughed. "It just makes more sense than living in a house. Everything I need is here."

He has been working on developing businesses in Cuba for nine years. Prior to that, he was an executive in the private security business. He sees his future here in Havana.

"I love it here," he said. "The people are great and if I want to go to the beach, I can get there for a $12 taxi ride."

The rest of the time he's working -- "seven days a week."

Contacts and meeting face to face are the only way to move the layers of bureaucracy. But it can be done and it has been done. There will be more done in the future.

"As Canadians, we have to be getting in here more now," he said. "We have to be ready and ahead of the Americans and everyone else should the day come when Cuba opens up more than it currently is. If it ever does, if you are not in, you will find it hard to get in."

Galipeau views a more open society -- possibly, in the next few years -- not only beneficial for foreign companies, but also for ordinary Cubans.

"I was talking a few years ago to a Cuban official who made the comment that we would not want to turn into a capitalist society in 24 hours like they did in Russia. It needs to be more progressive."

But with Acting President Raul Castro at the helm, there is a desire to speed up the progress.

"He has addressed that. He wants to improve the living conditions of its people, raise their salaries."

It takes capital to do that. Ventures and deals. Raul has made some with other countries in different sectors like tourism, mining and oil and gas -- and his government has many other projects on the table in other sectors like the sugar industry.

Drive around Cuba and you get a look at a poor country. Most workers earn a monthly income of $15 and receive government food rations of rice, beans and other products. Many cars are left over from the 1950s and the infrastructure is in decay.

Galipeau doesn't deny this but said it is also deceiving. There is more money here than people think, he added. In Cuba, there are more than 168,000 people who are millionaires in the Cuban peso. Transferred into the Canadian dollar that could mean a person is worth something close to $40,000 or $50,000. That is a lot of money here.

For business people in Canada, it starts with what they need here -- and that's lots. Paint, nails, hammers, glass, computers, clothing -- Cubans have a hunger for such items.

"Agriculture is a good sector," said Galipeau. "Fertilizer and farm equipment. Biotechnology is another."

The goal is to get products produced locally for domestic use and for export.

Canadian firms are needed to put up capital and provide technological know how. Cuba supplies the work force, the shop or building -- and the market.

But where such ventures were once embarked upon with Cuba owning 51% of a company, it is now called an association of co-production. "Today you are investing in Cuban companies," said Galipeau. "But the contract would be negotiated and they come out fair. There is profit to be made."

If Cuba was to open up similar to what is happening in China, those already doing business here would have an extreme edge. There are dozens of Canadian companies already taking that chance.

It does not work for everybody. Some companies never seem to get a partnership moving due -- very often -- to a lack of follow up. "It is getting better but it can take time," said Galipeau. "I recently got a contract for one company that took more than five years to get it done. When I called them, they were surprised. However I told them I had never stopped working on it."

Other deals have been formulated in mere months and this has been more his experience of late.

With each ministry having its own person that needs to sign off on a contract, it often comes down to the discretion of individuals. But, he said, once a deal is done with a Cuban, it is firm.

"They are good people to work with," said Galipeau. "It is a different system, but the people are fair and honest."

As the younger generation moves up, he said, you can see a thirst for moving faster. "Things are definitely improving, no question," he added. "I have been here for years and I have seen lately bars and cafes go up along the Malecon and other development. It is happening."

And it will continue to happen as things move forward. In the meantime Galipeau, who can be reached at Jgalipeau2006@gmail.com, looks at his phone and waits for it to ring. He speaks many languages but the one he speaks best is how to help Cuban and Canadian business people make money and work together.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The European Union held informal exploratory talks with Cuba on Monday on resuming closer ties after years of tension over human rights issues, an EU diplomat said.

The foreign ministers of EU presidency holder Portugal and Slovenia, next in the EU chair, plus European Development Commissioner Louis Michel met Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.

"It was an informal meeting authorized by the (EU) council to test the waters. No document was signed. The important thing was that the meeting happened at all," the diplomat said.

The 27-nation EU reached out to Cuba in June, inviting a Cuban delegation to Brussels to explore a thaw in ties on the condition that it agree to discuss human rights on the island.

Cuba's Foreign Ministry rebuffed the offer, saying talks could only happen when the EU lifts sanctions imposed in 2003.

Relations between Cuba and the EU soured that year after Brussels froze diplomatic contacts with Havana following the arrest of 75 Cuban dissidents in a crackdown. The EU eased restrictions on some lower-level contacts in 2005.

The EU diplomat said the ministers agreed to meet again early next year under Slovenian presidency ahead of a planned EU-Latin America summit.

They tried to identify issues for that meeting, including from the EU side human rights, governance reform and prisoners as well as trade facilitation, economic assistance and initiatives to help protect the Caribbean region from hurricanes and natural disasters, he said.

The EU has been divided on relations with Cuba, with former colonial power Spain leading advocates of engagement while the Czech Republic has spearheaded anti-communist opposition to closer ties on human rights grounds.

Havana, Sep 24 (Prensa Latina) The leader of Mexico's Labor Party Alberto Anaya predicts an understanding between his country and Cuba to totally settle differences in bilateral relations.

Anaya, who is visiting Cuba at the invitation of the Cuban Communist Party Central Committee, told Prensa Latina on Monday that neither the people nor the Mexican leftwing organizations have drifted apart from Cubans.

The island is always a motivation and attraction for revolutionaries, as a model in their struggles, so we expect everything that happened with previous Mexican presidents will be overcome.

The Labor Party leader affirmed there is much to do in today's Latin America and there cannot be estrangement between nations.

He explained that his visit to the island is to learn about this new stage of theCuban Revolution, and sent his warmest greetings to Cuban President Fidel Castro.

Monday, September 24, 2007

The closing years of the nineteenth century were also the closing years of the period of American isolation. The American doctrine of isolation was formulated by our first President: "The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible." For, he went on to say, "Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation." This was the rule that we lived by with only a brief interlude, during the Wilson Administration, until well into the Second World War.

Today that original American doctrine has been reversed. Now we act on the principle that the vital interests of Europe are the vital interests of America. But in addition to this, there is something radically new in our situation. If there were not something radically new, we could devote all our resources to working out the economic and social and political connections of that greater community to which Europe and the Americas belong. But while we must develop this greater community, the time we live in calls for more than that, and our problems are of a different kind.

It is not only that isolation has ended. It is that we have begun to live in the first years of the nuclear age. Ours is an epoch when the rivalry of two great social orders includes a rivalry in nuclear arms. We were very conscious of that fact during the crisis over Cuba. For in Cuba there was, for the first time in history, the kind of grim and deadly confrontation which could have led to thermonuclear war.

As a scientific phenomenon, the nuclear age began in 1945 with the explosion of the first nuclear bomb. But in world relations the nuclear age really began about ten years later. Until nearly the end of the forties, the United States was the only nuclear power in the world. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear device. But it was not until the middle of the fifties that the Soviet Union began to have an armory of nuclear weapons. Beginning about 1955, the West had ceased to have a monopoly of nuclear weapons, and by the end of the 1950s, the Soviet Union had become a very formidable nuclear power.

Since 1955 there have existed in the world two rival and conflicting coalitions armed with nuclear weapons. They are in conflict at many points on the globe. They distrust profoundly each other's purposes.

The essential and novel fact in the contemporary conflict, which distinguishes it radically from the great conflicts of the past—as, for example, that between Islam and Christendom—is that the two coalitions possess nuclear weapons. These weapons differ from all other weapons, even those used as recently as the Second World War, in that they carry with them not only a greater quantity of violence but violence of a radically different order and kind.

In the wars of the prenuclear age, which ended with the bomb on Hiroshima, a victorious power was an organized state which could impose its terms on the vanquished. War damage, though great, was not irreparable, as we can see in the recovery of Europe and of the Soviet Union.

But after a full nuclear exchange, such as the United States and the Soviet Union are now capable of, there might well be over a hundred million dead. After the destruction of the great urban centers of the northern hemisphere, with the contamination of the earth, the water, and the air, there would be no such recovery as we have known after the two world wars of this century.

For all practical purposes, the devastation would be irreparable. The United States has the power to reduce Soviet society to a smoldering ruin, leaving the survivors shocked and starving and diseased. In an exchange of nuclear weapons, it is estimated coolly by our American experts that the Soviet Union could kill between thirty and seventy million Americans. I hesitate to say what would happen to Europe, whether or not it had a nuclear force of its own. But it is a fact that the Soviet Union has far more medium-range missiles capable of reaching Europe than it has long-range missiles capable of reaching the United States.

A war of that kind would be followed by a savage struggle for existence as people crawled out of their cellars, and all the democracies would have to be converted into military dictatorships in order to keep some semblance of order among the desperate survivors.

All that I have said has been said before. But it has not been said by men who have lived through an actual confrontation which could have produced such a catastrophe. If anyone wishes to understand the American position in the Cuban crisis and the American attitude toward military power in the world today, he must remember that responsible Americans do not dare to forget the reality of the nuclear age. I know some of these men. They live with these realities. For that reason, they do not find themselves in close sympathy with those Europeans who talk as if nuclear weapons were merely a bigger and better kind of artillery, and who think that the new weapons are subject to the same rules of warfare and of diplomacy as were the old.

Because nuclear weapons mean mutual suicide, the paramount rule of policy in this age is that, as between the nuclear powers, there can be no important change in the status quo brought about by the threat of force or by the use of force. Nuclear war cannot be used, as war has been used in the past, as an instrument of national policy. The Cuban affair has much to teach us about the nature of diplomacy in the nuclear age.

The United States has for some time possessed a marked superiority in nuclear weapons. This superiority was quite sufficient to deter the Soviet Union from using or from threatening to use nuclear weapons to enforce its purposes in Cuba. But our superiority was not sufficient to permit the United States to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons to enforce all of our own purposes in Cuba.

President Kennedy was able to prevail because, having the power to achieve a limited objective, he had the wisdom to narrow his objective to what he had the power to achieve.

Thus, he had the power to deter the Soviet Union from attempting to break the blockade by Soviet naval action and by the threat of Soviet nuclear missiles. But the President himself could not use America's nuclear power to bring about the overthrow of Castro and the liquidation of a Communist regime in Cuba.

It was manifestly unthinkable to use nuclear weapons against Cuba. They had no relevance to the Cuban problem. It would have been an incalculable risk to invade and occupy Cuba at the risk of retaliatory military action against Berlin, action which could have escalated into nuclear war. The President adopted limited objectives which could be achieved by limited means. He demanded the removal of the Soviet strategic missiles. He did not demand the removal of the Castro regime or even of the Cuban defensive missiles.

The President was able to achieve the objectives to which he limited himself. Soviet nuclear power was neutralized by American nuclear power, and in the Cuban area, the United States also had overwhelming land, sea, and air forces which were quite capable of destroying or capturing the Soviet missiles. The Soviet government had no conventional forces in the Caribbean area, and once its nuclear power was neutralized, it had no other force it could use.

This was, as I see it, the military rationale of the Cuban affair. But I hasten to add that, while the confrontation ended peaceably, it was possible that things might have got out of hand in Moscow or in Washington. There were rash men in both places. But for several reasons things did not get out of hand. First of all, Mr. Khrushchev and Mr. Kennedy have intimate knowledge of nuclear weapons, and they have a poignant personal realization of the meaning of nuclear war. For another reason, throughout the crisis, the two heads of government kept channels of personal and official communication open.

Finally, and decisively, the United States, which had overall nuclear superiority and conventional superiority around Cuba, was careful to avoid the ultimate catastrophic mistake of nuclear diplomacy, which would be to surround the adversary and to leave him no way to retreat.

Washington did not forget that while nuclear war would be suicidal lunacy, it is an ever-present possibility. Nuclear war will not be prevented by fear of nuclear war. For, however lunatic it might be to commit suicide, a great power, if it is cornered, if all the exits are barred, if it is forced to choose between suicide and unconditional surrender, is quite likely to go to war.

This is one of the facts of life in the middle of the twentieth century. It is as much a fact as the existence of the megaton bomb itself, and it is a fact which must be given weight in the calculation of national policy. It was kept constantly in mind in the calculation of our Cuban policy.

There is a line of intolerable provocation and humiliation beyond which popular and governmental reactions are likely to become uncontrollable. It is the business of the governments to find out where that line is, and to stay well back of it.

Those who do not understand the nature of war in the nuclear age, those who think that war today is what war was in the past regard these careful attempts of statesmen not to carry provocation beyond the tolerable limits as weakness and softness and appeasement.

The Chinese do not understand the nuclear age, and they charge the Russians with appeasement for drawing back in Cuba. There are a good many people in the West who do not understand the nuclear age, and they are forever charging us with appeasement because we do not brandish the nuclear bomb in all our controversies with the Soviet Union. But prudence in seeking not to drive your opponent into a corner is not weakness and softness and appeasement. It is sanity and common sense and a due regard for human life.

It has, I know, been said in Europe that the United States has always had a special interest in Cuba, and that therefore the firm stand of the President is no proof that the United States would be equally firm in, let us say, Berlin.

Our answer to these skeptics must begin, I think, by asking them to look at what the United States was actually firm about in Cuba. It was firm, as I have already pointed out, about the Soviet strategic weapons in Cuba, which, in the American view, were offensive because they were good only for a first strike. Had the missiles been put in place, they would have changed seriously the balance of nuclear power in the world.

The United States deployed its whole military power, nuclear and conventional, against such an alteration of the status quo. It would do the same, and for the same kind of reason, if the Soviet Union moved with military force against Berlin or against any other point which is critically important to the maintenance of the status quo in the balance of strategic power.

___

JG: Very good article. We are lucky that we had a statesman in the White House back then.

JG: I am reproducing the following article so people will not be confused and will realize that the incident did not take place in the real Cuba, but just in some consumerist mall in far away New Zeland. There is very little crime in Cuba. They do not have the capitalist virus that makes people mug someone to acquire something of value.

Man mugged in Cuba Mall

Police are hunting a pair of "cowardly assailants" who robbed a young man in an area busy with Wellington drinkers and partygoers early on Saturday.

The 20-year-old victim withdrew cash at a machine on the corner of Cuba Mall and Dixon street about 1.30am.

He walked along Cuba Mall before two men wearing hoodies to cover their heads grabbed him from behind, pushed him against a window and demanded his wallet and mobile phone before pulling his watch off his wrist.

The man told police the watch was a family heirloom and therefore irreplaceable.

The assailants, both described as 25-years-old, 180cm with brown hair and wearing black hoodies, then walked back down Cuba Mall towards Dixon Street.

The victim was unhurt but shaken.

Detective Sergeant Damian Murphy said the attack happened at a time when a lot of people would have been in the area which has a number of bars nearby. Police are calling for anyone who witnessed anything to contact them.

Hip Hop culture is again being attacked by the major news outlets, which of late began with Don Imus, when his virulent racism was spotlighted after his hateful remarks against a college basketball team made up mostly of Black women. However, some capitalist news outlets appear to have embraced Hip Hop in revolutionary Cuba.

It’s not that this should be a confusing turn, not for those who’ve been in solidarity with the Cuban revolution. Nor should it be for people struggling against racism and oppression in the U.S.

When FIST, a revolutionary youth group, visited Cuba this July, the youth had an opportunity to meet with the head of the Cuban Rap Agency and several Cuban rap artists. The artists explained what the music means to them, how they first came in contact with Hip Hop culture, and how it is viewed by the revolution.

A New York Times article written last December entitled, “Cuba’s Rap Vanguard Reaches Beyond the Party Line,” attempts to assert that youth in Cuba are at odds with the revolutionary leadership and that these tensions are evident in the burgeoning Hip Hop culture there.

The writer claims that “many” of the five million people under the age of 30 question the system. It is not to suggest that Cubans are not critical. Perhaps the greatest criticism comes from Fidel, but criticism itself is not a bad thing. In an ever changing world there are always new questions and problems and healthy criticisms are part of deepening socialism, especially with the contradictions of a global capitalist market.

While many of the emerging leaders on the island were not alive during the revolutionary armed struggle, they came of age during one of the most difficult and challenging periods of the Cuban revolution. That period is known on the island as the Special Period, and the Cuban economy is just recovering from the effects.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost its largest trading partner. Eighty percent of Cuban trade was with the Soviet Union and the socialist camp in Eastern Europe.

While perhaps some can look at the counterrevolutionary reforms of Perestroika under Gorbachev as a warning sign, it was not expected that trade would stop immediately, but it did.

The U.S. and many in the imperialist West expected that the Cuban revolution would fail, but history and the resolve of the Cuban people were the best weapons to ensure that this did not happen.

The Cuban people experienced a significant reduction in caloric intake. Food had to be rationed. Temporary market reforms were put in place. Cuba promoted tourism on the island as its primary way of securing hard currency with which to trade on the international market.

Only a person who lived through it can truly attest to the difficulties, but regardless of the hardship, not one hospital or school closed. But neither did antagonism from the U.S. government cease.

It was during this period that Cubans began to really get exposed to Hip Hop culture. While rap music started being broadcast from Southern Florida in the late 1980s, it was in the 1990s—during the Special Period—when this culture and music began to take hold with youth on the island.

If one were to listen to this music from the late 1980s and early 1990s, known as the “Golden Age of Hip Hop,” what is clear is that the music was the pulse of oppressed Black and Latin@ youth, that the rhythms and the lyrics expressed the frustration and anger of youth living under the reactionary Reagan regime.

If the musical explosion that emanated from the South Bronx in the late 1970s was a manifestation of “a dream deferred,” then the evolution of the music to what it became in the late 1980s and early 1990s can best be described as the chain reaction in urban centers across the U.S.

Though Cuban youth may not have fully understood each and every word, the angry sentiment towards oppression is easily translated.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was felt hardest by underdeveloped nations. The Soviet Union, even with its many internal contradictions, was the buffer that held U.S. imperialism at bay and was supportive of liberation movements around the world.

The fact that Cuba was undergoing such a crisis as the Special Period, and that Hip Hop culture, rap music and its energy and break dancing, caught on during this time symbolizes the difficulty of the times and the draw of the culture.

Part 1 of a two part series.

The writer is a leader of FIST—Fight Imperialism, Stand Together—youth group and was a member of its delegation that traveled to Cuba in July.Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Alberto Jones, DVM, is a member of the Board of Directors of the Cuban American Alliance Education Fund, a nonprofit [501(c)(3)] national network of Cuban Americans that educates the public at large on issues related to hardships resulting from current United States-Cuba relations. The Alliance is a vehicle for the development of mutually beneficial engagements which promote understanding and human compassion.

PEMBROKE PINES - Florida Democratic party leaders on Sunday dared their national party to disenfranchise millions of voters next summer when their delegates meet in Denver to nominate their candidate for president.

Their dare, they added, might be bolstered by a lawsuit contending that "four rogue states" are conspiring to violate the civil rights of minorities in Florida by getting the Democratic National Committee to ignore the results of Florida's Jan. 29 party primary.

"For God's sake, this is the state where the election was stolen from in 2000," state party Vice Chairman Luis Garcia said at a news conference held in Broward because it is the most heavily Democratic county in the state.

At stake are the 210 delegates that Florida Democrats plan to send to the Democratic National Convention in Colorado. The national party in August threatened not to seat those delegates unless Florida delays its primary at least a week so New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina can pick their nominees for president.

"Four rogue states took action against the state of Florida," said Sen. Steve Geller of Cooper City, the Senate's Democratic leader.

Florida Democrats said it wasn't their fault the date was set for Jan. 29; the Republican-controlled Legislature did it. But Democratic leaders said they ruled out other options, such as holding a Democratic-only primary, a caucus or a mail-in vote.

"We looked at other alternatives and some looked serious and some not so serious, but at the end of the day we came down to the primary on Jan. 29 as the only way to have a fair and independent election," said party Chairwoman Karen Thurman.

The problem, she said, is that municipalities throughout Florida moved their elections to Jan. 29 and the state set the same date for Floridians to vote on a constitutional amendment for a "super" homestead exemption. This was done because presidential primaries attract people to the polls and without Democratic candidates on the ballot, Democratic voters might not show up to vote on the other issues.

"So there are a lot of reasons we stand together today to say to voters of the state to vote on Jan. 29 and to be assured their vote will count," she said.

Thurman said the national party isn't likely to carry out its threat to ignore the delegates selected by Florida Democrats.

"I believe they have to seat Florida's delegates," she said. "Florida is part of the United States."

Added Geller: "There is no question that in Denver our delegates will be seated, no question about it."

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, agreed but wouldn't say why she is so sure the national party will be forced to let Florida's Democratic votes count.

Geller said it might take a lawsuit to force the party to seat Florida delegates. He predicted one will be filed contending that the national party, by ordering Florida to move the date, is violating the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965

The suit will be brought, he said, by a minority resident of Collier, Hardee, Hendry, Hillsborough or Monroe County and contend that the four early voting states are "conspiring amongst each other to intimidate the presidential candidates, telling them that if they come down to Florida, they will be blackballed in the state."

According to Geller, the civil rights violation is that moving the primary date would force minority voters in the five counties to pay to see presidential candidates in person, something they could do for free if the candidates stumped in Florida for the scheduled Jan. 29 primary.

Because candidates would fear being blackballed, he said, their only appearances in Florida would be at fund-raisers open to those who pay. Without the fear of being blackballed, they would come to Florida and make traditional, free campaign appearances.

The suit would have to come from one of the five counties because they are being monitored by the U.S. Department of Justice for violations of minority voting rights.

In 1962, the Joint Chiefs Of Staff unanimously recommended that President Kennedy bomb a major American city to frame Fidel Castro and provide a pretext for conquering Cuba. It is one of history’s most amazing coincidences that four decades later New York City was bombed and Saddam Hussein was framed and Iraq was conquered… imagine the odds against the original military plan recurring with such precision. In any event, John Kennedy was a liberal Democratic president rather than a conservative professional soldier so he opted against bombing the American people. Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer then illegally attempted to destroy all evidence of the proposal so that he could deny it had ever been made, but the general was as inept as he was deceitful and some documentation survived.

During the Vietnam War, the American military again engaged in grotesque deceit. Commanding General William Westmoreland lied to Congress about the war’s progress, rhetorically transforming defeats into victories. The Pentagon routinely issued phony statistics and crafted false analyses that were designed to hoodwink the public. Following the needless deaths of fifty-eight thousand American soldiers and more than a million Vietnamese civilians the conflict finally ended, but the dishonesty of the armed forces did not. America’s military leaders lied about how many defenseless people were slaughtered during the Panama invasion. They even lied to their own afflicted soldiers about Gulf War Syndrome.

Despite conclusive historical evidence that the military has not earned a presumption of candor, liberals are being excoriated for doubting the congressional testimony of General David Petraeus. From the Republican perspective it does not matter that Petraeus is provably talking nonsense about American progress in Iraq – what matters is that liberals have no right to notice Petraeus is talking nonsense, and anyone who does notice is marginalized as being unpatriotic. Talk radio and Fox News and the rest of the Falangist commentariat feign outrage that a decorated military man is having his integrity questioned. Conservatives passionately argue that as a wounded war hero Petraeus is above reproach, but at the 2004 GOP convention these shameless hypocrites impugned wounded war hero John Kerry’s integrity by wearing Purple Heart-shaped band aids.

The contention that American military officers are somehow morally superior is absurd. General Nathan Bedford Forrest founded the Ku Klux Klan. During the Great Depression, General Douglas MacArthur ordered a homicidal attack against starving American World War I veterans who were begging for pensions. At the conclusion of World War II, General George Patton advocated annihilating the Soviet Union. General Curtis LeMay proposed unloading our nuclear arsenal upon North Vietnamese women and children. And then there was General Benedict Arnold.

These military leaders shared a common trait, but the trait was not integrity. They were all right wing nuts. According to a recent survey, ninety-seven percent of the military brass are registered Republicans, and like Lemnitzer many belong to the Doctor Strangelove wing of the party. The last two Democratic presidents experienced insubordination from the Pentagon because the military frequently prioritizes partisanship over patriotism.

There is also is the incomparable corruption of America’s self-styled super patriots. Generals and admirals routinely lobby on behalf of multi-billion dollar weapons systems, then leave the military and receive lucrative kickbacks from the manufacturers of those systems. In banana republics this illicit practice is known as “screwing the peasants”, but in the United States the peasants are discouraged from mentioning the phenomenon lest they be maligned as subversive.

In Animal Farm, George Orwell lampooned the mirage of Western egalitarianism by noting allegorically that while all animals are equal some are more equal than others. Orwell feared and despised the animals who were more equal, those beings to whom the rules do not apply. Dwight Eisenhower later dubbed these beings the “military/industrial complex”. Eisenhower feared and despised them, too. So did Abraham Lincoln, who spoke bitterly of dishonest generals and war profiteers.

Today, the power of the military/industrial complex stands at its zenith. Corporate America subsidizes both major political parties. Its mainstream media controls what most Americans learn, and therefore controls what most Americans think. Like all generals Petraeus is a functionary of the financial elite, so his critics are shouted down by the politicians and commentators who are also functionaries of the financial elite. American freedom of speech exists only as long as it does not threaten the ruling class, and the ruling class now possesses sixteen trillion dollars worth of Iraqi oil that it prefers not to relinquish. As a result, it is deemed traitorous to challenge the credibility of a transparently deceitful general who insists that national security dictates staying the corporate course.

Given the lay of the political landscape it would be vocational suicide if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama condemned soldierly mendacity. However, I am not an upwardly mobile Democratic politician and most likely neither are you, so let’s indulge in some forbidden truth.

General Petraeus committed perjury when he said that the war is going well. While he presented a dazzling array of meaningless statistics painstakingly compiled to distort reality, the relevant number remained unspoken. By the military’s own estimate, there are more terrorists in Iraq today than there were a year ago or two years ago or three years ago or before we invaded. That is a trend line slanting ominously towards defeat. There were fewer Nazis in 1945 than in 1941 because we were winning. There are more al-Qaeda now than in the past because we are losing. The Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu formalized the concept twenty-five hundred years ago: when the enemy is increasing in size, things are going badly. The teachings of Sun Tzu are West Point curriculum, so Petraeus knew that he was deceiving Congress with his upbeat testimony.

The general also lied when he said, “We have never given weapons to tribals. What we have done is applaud when they ask if they can point their guns at al-Qaeda.” This whopper represents the brazen deceit of someone who knows that being caught lying incurs no consequences. Petraeus had already acknowledged in June that he was arming Sunnis to combat al-Qaeda. Yet when testifying before Congress the general lied with supreme confidence, knowing that a huge Orwellian choir of sheep was massed to drown out anyone who challenged his deceptions.

Totalitarians consider the truth to be seditious. The truth is that the United States military lies frequently, and patriotism dictates acknowledging that truth. The alternative is to follow blindly as the progeny of Gepetto prosecute unnecessary corporate wars that damage our nation. Combating military lies with objective facts guarantees being accused of treason, but failure to do so guarantees being complicit with treason.

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